I just discovered that IHS has put online all back issues of Literature of Liberty. Fantastic. Published quarterly from 1978 to 1982, The Literature of Liberty, was
an interdisciplinary periodical intended to be a resource to the scholarly community. Each issue contains a bibliographical essay and summaries of articles which clarify liberty in the fields of Philosophy, Political Science, Law, Economics, History, Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, Education, and the Humanities. The summaries are baaed on articles drawn from approximately four hundred journals published in the United States and abroad.
Too bad it stopped in 1982. (IHS also has online back issues of the Humane Studies Review.)
In 1996, I tried to start something similar with the JLS–a Libertarian Literature Review. I did two installments, in Vol. 12, No. 2, and in Vol. Issue 13 No. 1 but was unable to keep up. Although the need for this is somewhat ameliorated by things like the Austrian Study Guide, a regular summary/review of recent scholarly literature of interest to libertarian theorists would still be extremely useful. To do it right, it would preferably have an interdisclipinary team of editors–specialists in the fields of law, political philosophy, history, economics, philosophy. Oh well. One can dream.
{ 5 comments }
Seems like that sort of project would be much easier now. Anyone with access to a major academic database (i.e., anyone on a college campus) can search for key words like “libertarian*”, “Austrian school”, “Austrian economics,” etc.
I’d certainly like to see something like that.
Perhaps a new project for the Mises site – a Digg-like journal, where every academic article submitted is voted on by Stephan’s “interdisciplinary editors”. If the article got 0 positive votes, it wouldn’t be “published” on the online journal. All other articles would be ranked according to the votes. This helps cut down the time commitment of the editors, as there is no need to engage in advocacy or compromise in article selection. As some sort of feedback to the editors, readers could then vote on the published articles.
Just an idea. As Stephan notes, the big obstacle in such projects is finding people with spare time to commit. The less time you’re asking for, the more people you’ll find capable of contributing. Decentralization is more than just a motto for government…
BTW, there’s something wrong with the blog’s stylesheet: the font in a blockquote is too big, and the first paragraph after the blockquote is outdented, and uses the same font as the blockquote.
I think David Gordon’s got this covered.
This page is not legal HTML/xhtml, either: if you look at the source for this page, each response is in a “div” with id=”commentbody” – the id values of elements in a given page are required to be unique (i.e., you can’t have [div id="commentbody"] for each comment!)
(Not sure if there’s a better place to report this)
Comments on this entry are closed.